Predicting bioprocess targets of chemical compounds through integration of chemical-genetic and genetic interactions

PLoS Comput Biol. 2018 Oct 30;14(10):e1006532. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006532. eCollection 2018 Oct.

Abstract

Chemical-genetic interactions-observed when the treatment of mutant cells with chemical compounds reveals unexpected phenotypes-contain rich functional information linking compounds to their cellular modes of action. To systematically identify these interactions, an array of mutants is challenged with a compound and monitored for fitness defects, generating a chemical-genetic interaction profile that provides a quantitative, unbiased description of the cellular function(s) perturbed by the compound. Genetic interactions, obtained from genome-wide double-mutant screens, provide a key for interpreting the functional information contained in chemical-genetic interaction profiles. Despite the utility of this approach, integrative analyses of genetic and chemical-genetic interaction networks have not been systematically evaluated. We developed a method, called CG-TARGET (Chemical Genetic Translation via A Reference Genetic nETwork), that integrates large-scale chemical-genetic interaction screening data with a genetic interaction network to predict the biological processes perturbed by compounds. In a recent publication, we applied CG-TARGET to a screen of nearly 14,000 chemical compounds in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, integrating this dataset with the global S. cerevisiae genetic interaction network to prioritize over 1500 compounds with high-confidence biological process predictions for further study. We present here a formal description and rigorous benchmarking of the CG-TARGET method, showing that, compared to alternative enrichment-based approaches, it achieves similar or better accuracy while substantially improving the ability to control the false discovery rate of biological process predictions. Additional investigation of the compatibility of chemical-genetic and genetic interaction profiles revealed that one-third of observed chemical-genetic interactions contributed to the highest-confidence biological process predictions and that negative chemical-genetic interactions overwhelmingly formed the basis of these predictions. We also present experimental validations of CG-TARGET-predicted tubulin polymerization and cell cycle progression inhibitors. Our approach successfully demonstrates the use of genetic interaction networks in the high-throughput functional annotation of compounds to biological processes.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Cell Cycle* / drug effects
  • Cell Cycle* / genetics
  • Colchicine / pharmacology
  • Drug Discovery / methods*
  • Gene Regulatory Networks* / drug effects
  • Gene Regulatory Networks* / genetics
  • Protein Multimerization / drug effects
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Small Molecule Libraries*
  • Systems Biology / methods*
  • Tubulin / drug effects
  • Tubulin / metabolism
  • Tubulin Modulators / pharmacology
  • Yeasts / drug effects
  • Yeasts / genetics
  • Yeasts / physiology

Substances

  • Small Molecule Libraries
  • Tubulin
  • Tubulin Modulators
  • Colchicine

Associated data

  • Dryad/10.5061/dryad.nr2cf12